Zero Trust Access

Why Zero Trust is a Better Alternative to Business VPNs?

Instasafe

Mar 9, 2022 • 4 min read

Why Zero Trust is a Better Alternative to Business VPNs?

Companies and organisations have been using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) for decades to allow third-party vendors, employees, and contractors access to organisations’ internal data, applications, and other resources.

However, in today’s age—VPNs aren’t well-equipped to handle the changing technological and security needs.

Thus, organisations are looking for VPN alternatives to ensure maximum network security to keep up and handle the increasing security risks and threats—organisations are looking for VPN alternatives to ensure maximum network security.

One such alternate solution is the Zero Trust Security model. This article will learn the disadvantages of VPNs for your organisation and why Zero Trust can be the best solution.

What is a VPN, and Why Aren’t They the Best Solution for Secure Remote Access?

A Virtual Private Network allows you to transfer data, files, and information privately to support remote employees or connect networks at the company via the public internet.

It basically connects remote end-users and employees to private company resources and applications through encrypted tunnels. Traditional security measures such as user authentication are applied once the end-users are brought to the central location—traditional security measures such as user authentication is applied.

However, this security solution comes with many problems. Here are some of the critical drawbacks of the business VPN solution:

VPNs are based on perimeter-based security—protecting only the external network and not the internal network resources. If malware or malicious users get through the network—they can easily access the network resources and assets and roam via lateral movement techniques.
Since VPNs support dozens of remote users and traffic—it results in huge backhaul and network latency, affecting user performance.
Adding VPN solutions to scale the network increases network complexity, which adds more overhead costs, and the network gets difficult to manage.
VPNs increases the attack surface by granting network and resource access to every user—increasing cybersecurity threats and risks.

Hence, businesses are looking for a VPN alternative technology considering these risks and disadvantages. So now, let’s see what makes Zero Trust an ideal and reliable solution and VPN alternative.

Reasons Why Zero Trust is a Better VPN Alternative

Business VPNs have become more complicated, less secure, and more expensive for secure remote access.

On the other hand, Zero Trust Security grants the user access to only specific locations or resources instead of the entire network to authorised and authenticated users. Furthermore, it relies and works on the “Never Trust, Always Verify” principle—considering every user untrusted and compromised.

Here are the benefits of Zero Trust VPN and why it’s a better and more secure solution for your organisation.

Offers resource-level protection

While VPNs only protects the network perimeter—Zero Trust also protects the internal network applications and resources by providing granular level and user role-based access to each user.

It implements micro-segmentation by providing access to only those resources the users need to complete their tasks. This micro-segmentation blocks lateral movement and make data breaches and hackers less effective and dangerous.

Transparent user experience

The Zero Trust Client applications continuously run in the background on user and employee devices.

The role-based rules make it easy for clients to identify which resources the user can access so that routing can happen seamlessly without user involvement.

Ensures maximum privacy

The Zero Trust VPN alternative reduces your company’s overall attack surface and makes your network invisible to the public eye.

In addition, it also makes sure that the user traffic on your network is accessible to you only—using the Privacy First approach.

Eliminates performance bottlenecks

Zero Trust simplifies security by creating an encrypted and direct connection between each user and network resource.

Since it doesn’t rely on the private network and access to the cloud assets and resources happens through the internet, users experience seamless performance without latency or backhauling issues.

Easy to maintain and deploy

The Zero Trust solutions and components are easy to deploy to user devices and resources compared to VPNs. In addition, since Zero Trust has software-based solutions, they can easily run on the organisation’s cloud-based or on-premise resources.

Moreover, it removes the redundant security stacks of VPNs requiring complex management and replaces them with a single unified, secure access solution for users.

In addition, it also offers a simple console to the administrators to off-board, on-board, and manage user accounts with ease.

Conclusion

Some businesses continue to use VPNs that pose greater security risks, increase the attack surface, come with performance and latency issues, and get difficult to scale and manage.

However, maximum security authenticated and authorised access, seamless user experience, utmost privacy, high performance, easy maintenance, and simplified access solution makes Zero Trust the perfect VPN alternative for businesses.